Introducing The Substack Super Group

The next chapter for Substack newsletters

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Introducing The Substack Super Group

The appeal of a newsletter is simple enough: pay $5 per month or $50 per year (give or take) and get weekly if not daily content from your favorite writer delivered directly to your inbox. But as many critics have pointed out, the boom in newsletter publishing suffers from a bit of a math problem, because realistically how many $5 Substacks or Patreons do you really want to pay for, especially when you can get a subscription to a full magazine, packed with many authors, for roughly the same cost? 

Some newsletters, particularly on Substack, have been runaway financial successes, netting writers like Matt Yglesias, Matt Taibbi, Alex Berenson, Andrew Sullivan, and Anne Helen Petersen hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, who writes “Letters From an American,” the most successful newsletter on the platform (and also probably your dad’s favorite), earns millions of dollars per year. But the more common Substack writers are the ones who are trying to scrape by, or who aren’t even close to scraping by.

“It’s really a winner-takes-all situation. It’s a very, very small percentage of creators that make enough money to sustain themselves,” said author Jessa Crispin, who in 2002 started the website “Bookslut,” one of the greats of the internet’s book blog era. “Everyone else is just sort of begging for scraps.” Instead of launching her own personal newsletter, Crispin is making a return to digital media with a Substack that looks a little different: “The Culture We Deserve,” which launched on Substack last month, aims to be a full-fledged arts publication that will publish a host of authors.

If the early years of the newsletter era unbundled the publication, we’re now beginning to tip back toward the multi-author model. “The Culture We Deserve” joins a small but growing number of multi-author newsletter pubs like the personal essay-focused “Open Secrets Mag,” the leftist political blog “Discourse,” and the entertainment rag “The Ankler,” as well as single-author outlets that have expanded into regularly working with contributors. It’s a shift that comes as ad-based digital media is contracting — hitting sites that publish cultural journalism particularly hard — and Substack has switched from throwing money at big-name writers to having negative revenue and selling shares to readers. In this rather dire moment for independent media, will the kind of fun, creative journalism that in the past was published on blogs and independent websites find a remunerative new home in readers’ inboxes? Or, as more multi-author publications launch on the platform will it once again be the conservatives, COVID truthers, transphobes, and other reactionaries who find much of the success?

While there are other subscription platforms, including Patreon and Ghost, Substack has become almost synonymous with having a digital newsletter, and many of the multi-platform publications are on there too. According to Crispin, it wasn’t easy to set up a Substack with multiple authors, but it was less of a pain than doing so on any other platform. (“The Culture We Deserve” did not receive any financial or technical help or support from Substack.) Crispin knew she didn’t want to build her own website, she wanted to be able to have subscriber revenue, and out of the various choices, “Substack was the least disappointing.”

But more complex content management tools are in the works, Substack co-founder and chief writing officer Hamish McKenzie told Study Hall in an interview. “Certainly it’s true that the bread and butter for Substack has been individual newsletters,” said McKenzie. “It’s great for solo artists or small bands, but it’s not necessarily great for the super group,” — the newsletter that publishes a myriad of big-name writers rather than just one. That’s changing, however, as Substack works to adapt to the “accelerating trend” in multi-author newsletters, as McKenzie called it.

Thus far, the two marquee multi-author newsletters Substack has worked closely with to develop new content management tools represent some of the worst editorial tendencies on the platform. Jonah Goldberg’s “The Dispatch” was one of Substack’s first multi-author publications when it launched in 2019, and Substack worked to support its endeavor to publish an array of writers like Kevin Williamson (who once suggested the death penalty for people who have abortions) and David French (who is one of many conservative writers currently defending Nazi art collector and Clarence Thomas pal, Harlan Crow). Last year, “The Dispatch” left Substack in part because the platform had, at the time, “squarely cast its lot with individual creators.”

More recently Substack developed new website admin tools for Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press,” which, despite its digital-news-site style, is built entirely on Substack. “Email is still central to the publishing,” McKenzie said. 

Weiss is now earning more than $3 million annually in subscription revenue (“The Free Press” has also raised a few million from investors, and has a staff of 15 full-time employees). The newsletter’s stories are not only deeply damaging to transgender people — particularly trans kids — but are also just fundamentally very bad journalism. 

“We believe in creating moderation tools for writers, so that they can decide for themselves how best to run their own Substack communities,” McKenzie said. “Our focus is on building better infrastructure for independent publishers, not on deciding who has the right opinions and who has the wrong ones.”

With the trans panic again playing an outsized role in this fledgling multi-author era of Substack, it seems as if it could end up looking awfully similar to the single-author boom, when single-author newsletter’s like Weiss’s took up so much oxygen by pandering to the culture war and reheating conservative talking points.

By no means is “The Culture We Deserve” vying for the same eyeballs, but the attention economy is a limited space. So how are smaller publications like Crispin’s supposed to compete? The new multi-author publications may at least have an advantage over single-author newsletters as they scale up: they have more brain and writing power to propel a publication and, ideally, find and grow a larger audience. And that’s partly why some newsletters that started out as single-author endeavors now regularly publish contributors, too.

Working with contributors has provided Luke O’Neil, who started his newsletter “Hell World” in 2018, the opportunity to take the occasional break from publishing content twice a week. (O’Neil left Substack for Ghost in 2022.) “The subject matter and headspace that I have to get into to write about what is usually miserable shit takes a toll,” he said. Once O’Neil started making a bit of money off of his newsletter, he viewed that as an opportunity to spotlight work “that isn’t necessarily published in other publications.” 

P.E. Moskowitz, who started the newsletter “Mental Hellth” in 2020, and now regularly publishes other writers, said, “Having outside contributors allows me to bring in new perspectives I wouldn’t think of and couldn’t write from.” (Moskowitz is also a co-founder of Study Hall.)

“People joke that Substack is basically just reinventing the magazine because every publication is eventually gonna be multiple people running it, much like a magazine,” they added. “To which I say: yes. Good. We need a sustainable business model that allows for magazine-esque functions!”

Crispin said that no one involved with “The Culture We Deserve” (she has a managing editor, Charles Blackstone, and an intern too) is quitting their day jobs just yet. In addition to subscription revenue, she hopes to bring in some sponsorship dollars through a forthcoming podcast that will be widely released. Instead of paying a flat rate or per-word fee to contributors, she plans on paying contributors a percentage of the monthly revenue.

“We’re still in the phase of, what could this actually be or do, which is exciting! But it’s also actually terrifying,” Crispin said. “How is this going to function financially, creatively?” 

There are a lot of bigger questions to answer. Having worked in media for 20 years, she described the current moment as “the absolute worst time through the two decades to figure out what an audience wants or how to connect with them.”   

“The intermediaries are all terrible,” she said. “Social media is a nightmare, but there are so few workarounds.” 

But for Crispin, solving these issues is worth it. “This is the first time I’ve been excited about a project for a very long time,” she said.

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Q&A with Robin Wigglesworth, the Financial Times editor who can find the humor in an economic crisis.

I’d be hard pressed to think of a publication with a more stuffy reputation than The Financial Times, the British paper that’s notorious for its peachy-pink newsprint and a readership that’s comprised of bankers, stockbrokers, and whoever else makes millions of dollars screwing us all  over. That’s why I was surprised to see a recent FT story about a whole class of risky Credit Suisse bonds being wiped out with the headline, “We didn’t expect the leopards to eat OUR faces, say AT1 bondholders.” Wait, FT has jokes? This story was in fact from the FT blog “Alphaville,” which has been known for its voicier coverage of financial matters since it launched in 2006. Under editor Robin Wigglesworth, who took over last March after over a decade in various other roles at the paper, “Alphaville” is undergoing something of a revival. Last year, “Alphaville” took on hard-hitting investigations like: Is Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon actually any good at DJing? More recently, the blog has run stories with headlines like “Zero francs given” (about the surprising resilience of the Swiss franc) and “Greed: bad, actually” (about how high profit margins, i.e., greed, are the true cause of inflation), illustrated with an upside-down photo of Gordon Gekko. Study Hall caught up with Wigglesworth about what it’s like to run such a blog (which still maintains a devoted commenter community) within a more staid publication, and how to find humor in the markets — particularly when everything is going wrong.

How do you describe the tone of “Alphaville,” and how does that approach exist alongside the more formal approach of FT?

At its heart, it’s about communicating complex issues to people in a conversational way. I try to write the way that I would explain something to a smart friend over drinks or something.

Quite often in journalism, we have to shoe horn substance into the article form that existed a hundred years ago. But some people have a certain conversational tone that’s great for explaining that substance, so at “Alphaville” we let people write the way that they sound.

How does “Alphaville” function within FT?

It’s complicated. We are very much part of the FT, but we have always operated pretty autonomously. “Alphaville” was groundbreaking coming from a traditional newspaper like FT in 2006. But the media world has become closer to “Alphaville.” In the last few months, I have managed to get “Alphaville” stories onto the front page of FT, which never would have happened in the beginning.

We try not to bend too much and we’re not trying to be provocative on purpose. We can’t become too close to FT, because then why be “Alphaville” anyway? 

Where do you find the humor in a story like the banking crisis?

Crises almost by definition hurt people, and it’s important not to lose sight of that. But we aren’t writing anything that people aren’t already saying over drinks or over coffee or on their lunch breaks. 

Beyond the humor, which can be a tool for explaining something complex, it’s about communicating the delightful. It’s not just all money stuff and horrible people. Finances and markets are kind of a nice synthesis of a lot of human activity, and it’s always changing and always making smart people do stupid things — and that’s always sort of inherently funny. The markets have a sort of magical way of making even smart, successful people look dumb at times.

I think this stuff is fun and interesting, and maybe we can use the fun bits to slip people who don’t normally read “Alphaville” and the FT something serious too.

How do readers respond to this editorial approach?

Our audience definitely skews toward finance, and I suspect it skews younger than the rest of The Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal. “Alphaville” has always been closer to its readers, certainly more than FT. “Alphaville” was always about engagement before it became important or fashionable. It’s kind of essential to what we do. I always have all the “Alphaville” journalists read the comments; it engenders trust in the journalism. It’s not a passive relationship: We’re writing like we are talking to a friend over drinks, and while that friend might say that we’re an idiot, that’s fine as well, right? 

We’re very humble about what we know… Quite often we’ll say, “This is what’s going on, this is what we think, but tell us where we’re wrong in the comments” and oftentimes the comments are better than the article — than the journalism — itself.

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COMINGS & GOINGS:

—Rachel Tashjian is joining The Washington Post as a fashion writer for its Style section. Tashjian was previously the fashion news director at Harper’s Bazaar.
—Emily Kirkpatrick is leaving Vanity Fair where she was a contributing editor for the last three years.
—Meira Gebel is joining Axios as a reporter for its new newsletter devoted to all things Portland. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE:

—The Los Angeles Times spoiled the twist on “Succession” for Study Hall editor Erin Corbett. “It took me a good minute to realize… But, he died doing what he loved,” she said.
—This story is a bit complicated, so take some notes. Last week, Elon Musk declared war on Substack after the newsletter behemoth announced Notes — a new “short-form content” feature that’s basically a Twitter clone. The Doge King didn’t take too kindly to having a new competitor and sabotaged all engagement with Substack links on Twitter. Matt Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone journalist who Musk entrusted to report on the Twitter Files (still confused about what that was and why it mattered), said he told the CEO he was “alarmed” by his disruptive tactics and announced he was taking his well actually shtick to Substack Notes (weirdly, Taibbi also claimed that Musk offered him to post articles directly onto Twitter, RIP our feeds).  Subsequently, Musk unfollowed Taibbi and falsely accused him of working for The Big Sub — yikes! Substack links, for now, are no longer disabled. However, this is one of many instances that point to the platform’s gradual decay (by the way, the Twitter Circle may no longer be a safe space to shit-post about your employer).
—Maer Roshan was fired from Los Angeles Magazine after serving as editor-in-chief for four years. Last December, Engine Vision Media, a venture backed by “power lawyers and business leaders,” bought the magazine. Los Angeles may soon “lean more toward celebrity-friendly covers and lifestyle coverage,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
—Members of the Writers Guild of America are voting online this week to decide whether to authorize a strike over wages, as Hollywood writers say they are “underpaid and overworked,” according to The Daily Beast. A WGA report published in March found that “companies have used the transition to streaming to cut writer pay and separate writing from production, worsening working conditions for series writers at all levels.” The report noted that compensation has “stagnated over the past four years” for screenwriters, as well. It should come as no surprise that media workers, tech workers, and Hollywood writers have a lot in common. The WGA’s current contract expires on May 1.
—Kat Craddock, the editorial director at SAVEUR, which was purchased by Recurrent Ventures three years ago, announced that she teamed up with an investor to buy the food publication from its “most recent parent company.” Last year, Recurrent Ventures laid off dozens of employees and shuttered Mel Magazine, which it acquired in July 2021. “I, along with our core editorial team, will begin transitioning our operations to thrive as a nimble and independent publication,” Craddock wrote.